My sweetie was. In '85 he participated in the UC Berkeley apartheid protests. Their goal was to get the University to divest all the money they had in holdings with companies that were doing business in South Africa. After much work (and more than a few arrests) the University finally divested their holdings the following year.

He participated in a lot of other demonstrations and protests too, but he says that was the only one that was truly successful in meeting its goal.

I've been to protests, they don't always get the desired results, but sometimes they do work. I've seen them have the clearest and quickest results when the protest focuses on a specific and relatively local problem.

Yep, since the goal was to keep the focus on some of the issues my college had with transparency. If an issue is local, it can be resolved, but national issues can take a long time and a lot of slow progress